social service is trying to reach in a helpful way everyone who needs. The rapid development of the park idea, from the small flower plot to the metropolitan park system, shows how great value is placed on recreation for all the people.

Within the last few years public baths have been opened in nearly all of the great cities of the land, and public comfort stations are now deemed essential to the health and morals of city dwellers.

The social service of a city attracts attention when applied to the recreation of the child. The playground and the small recreation park is in fact a play school destined to produce great results for the nation. Supervised recreation reduces crime, promotes health, cultivates the sense of others' rights, teaches the value of community life, inspires to cleanliness of body and neighborhood.

The city, by the establishment of the recreation center and the small park is taking to itself much of the work of the social settlement, and because it is supported by the people's money can accomplish a much larger work. By this new form of social settlement the foreigner can be assimilated; by it the city

becomes the teacher of the immigrant, where as formerly the saloon keeper and the ward politician were the only instructors.

Some cities have gone into the life-saving business, and instead of degrading manhood by the old methods of punishment, have undertaken to make men out of those who have gone wrong. Not content to handle only the results of conditions that make for crime, they have gone back to the starting point. They are asking through their commissions, judges and social workers what the conditions are that would lead a boy into crime. Is it truancy? Then establish a truant school. Is it bad home life? Then if the home can not be remedied, place the boy in a parental school. Does the boy need a guardian? Place him on probation under the care of a large-hearted man or woman. Let the adult first offenders be given this same treatment and the majority will be saved from prison. Let the victims of drink work on the city farm rather than have the oft-repeated jail sentence. Abolish the chaingang, as Cleveland is doing and treat every prisoner as a man. When Tom Johnson was

criticized because the city of Cleveland had not made money out of the prisoners during his administration, he replied: "We are not trying to make money out of prisoners; we are trying to make men." What Cleveland is doing should be the ideal for every city. The higher ideals of service, once found only in the church, are now permeating all society. The church ought to rejoice that its allies in world betterment are now found in the mart, the court, the school, and in legislative hall.

Our cities are rapidly becoming great in material splendor. It remains for them to become great in the higher things of life. That this is the dominant thought of this decade is shown in the united efforts on the part of groups of workers and city officials to recognize as curable and preventable much of the disease, accident, crime, and poverty which now curse the city life. Governor Hughes well expressed the social hope when he said: "I have no illusions with reference to the future. Laziness, thriftlessness, evil passions, and inordinate appetite will continue to wreck human lives. But we can replace ignorance with knowledge; we can give access

to air and light; we can build barriers against infection; we can keep our city clean, wholesome and attractive; we can see to it that human beings may labor under conditions with proper consideration for life and health and efficiency, and we can make work for social uplifting fruitful and progressive."

When all of our city officials remember that they are servants of the people, then will the movement for the social uplift go forward with greater rapidity.

CHAPTER III

Nations at Work in Human Uplift

The governments of the world have been subject to change; the absolute becomes the limited or constitutional monarchy; the limited or constitutional monarchy becomes the republic; and the republic itself becomes more and more democratic.

The early American idea of democracy was that the least government possible was the best government. Everything must be left to private initiative, and only that done collectively which evidently must be done to produce the best results-such, for instance, as the care of streets, of the postal service, of prisons, and later the oversight of the public schools.

But private conduct of public service soon produced a monopoly and the people were forced ofttimes against their will to take on new departments of public service for the common good.